What’s Brand New and What’s Coming with LinkedIn

Recently LinkedIn has been pushing out tons of updates and new features that enhance the social media platform’s functionality and power as a tool for marketing. Are you aware of these LinkedIn marketing enhancers?

In this article I will cover all of their recent updates and there’s still more to come. Many of these new features will help you streamline and ramp up your LinkedIn marketing efforts.

8 New Features to Improve Your LinkedIn Marketing

1) Include multiple photos in your social Linkedin status updates

Perhaps taking a cue from other popular social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn has now granted users the ability to include more than one photo in your status updates if you’re using an iOS-powered device. This is one of the platform’s many functionality updates since it gave its user interface a major makeover earlier this year.

The ability to post multiple photos in a single LinkedIn update makes it easier for you to share event highlights with your professional network. They have also confirmed that the same functionality will soon be available on Android and LinkedIn for desktop.

2) Share a draft of your content before you publish

Another one of LinkedIn’s recent updates is the ability to share a draft of your article with your LinkedIn network with just the click of a button. To be more specific, the “Share Draft” button, which can be found in the article edit menu. Once you click the button, you will be presented with a link to the article, which you can then share with specific people you’d like to get feedback from.

This will help you improve upon your content marketing before you publish it for your entire network to see, and is also great practice for you in terms of getting and receiving feedback. Now, with this article-sharing feature, you can keep creating high-quality content as part of your LinkedIn marketing plan without having to worry about letting mistakes slip past you – or worse, having other people talk about those mistakes before you even get the chance to catch them.

3) Take control of your LinkedIn comments

In this day and age, the best mechanism for ensuring that you’ll have only authentic and relevant comments appearing on your LinkedIn updates is… yourself. Now, LinkedIn has granted users with the ability to choose whether or not to receive comments on shared articles and status updates.

While marketers do recognize the capacity of social media comments to increase the reach and longevity of your updates (and to help you reach a wider, relevant audience), LinkedIn also acknowledges that there are just some discussions and comments that you might not want to show on your profile or be included in. So, you and other LinkedIn users are now able to remove any tags or mentions on posts and comments that you do not feel like following or participating in.

4) Share your LinkedIn posts everywhere online

If LinkedIn was more restrictive about the audience for your content before, it has now relaxed its policies slightly on guests and logged-out members. Now, the various content that you share on LinkedIn (videos, posts, and articles) can be viewed by internet users, even when they’re not logged into LinkedIn.

You can initiate the process yourself by getting the URL of the update you want to share from the control menu. You can then send the link to your contacts on other social media platforms, or even across the worldwide web. This will definitely give your LinkedIn marketing efforts a welcome boost.

5) Captivate your audience with LinkedIn Video

Another freshly announced feature on LinkedIn is the LinkedIn Video feature which, incidentally, has also been one of the most-requested additions to the social media platform’s functionality since its inception.

Designed to allow LinkedIn users to access and view native videos whether on a desktop or on a mobile device, LinkedIn Video is the fulfilment of many digital marketers’ dream to give their social selling strategies a much-needed audio-visual upgrade. LinkedIn has begun rolling out this brand new feature to the platform’s over 500 million users through its mobile app.

Anyone interested in anayltics will also appreciate how LinkedIn Video not only provides standard data, but also professional information on the majority of people who viewed your videos, such as their places of employment and current job positions.

Additionally, B2B businesses and professionals who have been waiting for a video platform that matches their target buyers better than Facebook’s or Instagram’s are ecstatic, as well as content creators who will now gain access to useful data such as view count, social shares, and other important metrics. With video content proving to be a progressively stronger force in digital marketing, LinkedIn’s decision to finally integrate native video sharing into its list of features can only mean good things for the platform’s future.

6) An enhanced LinkedIn content and calendar experience

If iOS users have Siri, Galaxy S8 and S8+ owners can count on Bixby to be their high-tech personal assistant. As a bonus, Bixby brings with it a souped-up version of LinkedIn’s typical calendar feature. Simply swipe right on Bixby’s home screen, and you’ll get important data on your meetings for the day, as well as the most popular news items that you’ll want to be aware of.

Bixby has a “My Schedule” feature that sends you meeting notifications, along with links to the LinkedIn profiles of the people you’re scheduled to meet. Think of it as a true virtual assistant that provides you with crucial information to prepare you for your meeting. As for news updates, Bixby offers easy access to Trending Stories, showing you the top LinkedIn stories that are relevant to your field of professional expertise.

All you have to do is download the LinkedIn app on your Galaxy 8 or 8+, and you’re all set.

7) Gain access to better networking

If you’re in search of a better way to stay at the top of your professional networking game, look no further than the LinkedIn app for Windows 10, which is designed to make the process of connecting with colleagues in the industry quick and hassle-free.

Among the LinkedIn app’s special features for Windows 10 are the real-time delivery of professional updates, data and insights on your profile views, and updates on currently trending news in your network.

8) All-new LinkedIn notification features to keep you a step ahead

Here’s a quick rundown of LinkedIn’s newest notification features, designed to keep you up to speed with everything going on in your professional network.

Customize your notifications. First, LinkedIn now allows you to customize your notifications. You can choose the kind and frequency of updates that you’ll receive from your professional network, whether you’re using a desktop PC or checking your LinkedIn profile through your mobile device.

Mute and unmute or unfollow. You can also choose to mute or unmute notifications from photos or posts that you are tagged in, or just unfollow some of your connections whom you think you need a bit of a break from. (If you’re worried that they’ll find out, don’t be – they won’t get any notification that you’ve unfollowed them, and you will stay connected on LinkedIn.)

Turn off. You can also simply turn off specific kinds of notifications that you don’t want to receive, such as updates on newly published articles from your LinkedIn connections or birthday notifications. The best thing about these features is that you can quickly undo them by just choosing to follow, unmute, or receive notifications again.

Daily rundown. There’s also a daily rundown of news through the aptly named Daily Rundown feature. The Daily Rundown functionality gives you a glimpse of the day’s top news items, ensuring that you’ll never run out of industry-specific things to learn (and to talk about at work with your colleagues).

Search appearances. If you’re the type who is deeply concerned with how potential employees and connections are finding you on LinkedIn, you can get a better understanding of this by checking your weekly Search Appearances notification. With this information, you can easily come up with a strategy to optimize your LinkedIn profile and get found by the audience whom you want to find you.

Wrapping up

These changes to LinkedIn shouldn’t be surprising at all. After all, the social media space is a dynamic and ever-changing one, and LinkedIn is certainly no exception.

Based on LinkedIn’s own findings, 50% of B2B consumers use the platform when making their purchasing decisions. It’s up to you to devise how you can use LinkedIn’s new features to help guide these consumers towards the right decision. You’ll be at a distinct advantage by just familiarizing yourself with LinkedIn’s updates and plan how you can best maximize them for your LinkedIn marketing and lead generation efforts.

The LinkedIn marketing landscape can easily confuse and overwhelm any business owner, sales professional or marketer who fails to keep themselves in the know about the platform’s newest features. To stay abreast of LinkedIn changes, best practices and more foilow me on LinkedIn where I consistent share updates.